Roughdraft review

Roughdraft review

Roughdraft is a single-file Markdown viewer/editor for inline review. The user may refer to it as rd in natural language; treat rd as shorthand, but do not create or modify any shell alias, executable, symlink, or command named rd.

When the user asks for a plan, write the plan as a Markdown file on disk before asking them to review it.

Opening a file for review

roughdraft open "/absolute/path/to/file.md"

Open one .md file at a time. If Roughdraft is not running, roughdraft open starts it automatically.

Leave the command running. Do not interrupt, kill, background, detach, or treat the waiting process as cleanup. The wait is intentional: Roughdraft exits the command after the user clicks Done Reviewing, and that exit is the signal to resume — read the file from disk and respond to any CriticMarkup comments or suggested changes.

CriticMarkup (Roughdraft-flavored)

Base markers:

• Comment: {>>comment<<}
• Insertion: {++new text++}
• Deletion: {--old text--}
• Substitution: {~~old~>new~~}
• Highlight: {==text==}

Each marker may be followed by an attribute block: id (stable document-local id), by (author), at (ISO timestamp), re (parent comment/suggestion id in a reply thread).

When adding a new comment or suggested change: generate a stable id (c1, c2, … for comments; s1, s2, … for suggestions), set by to your agent label, set at to the current ISO timestamp, and set re when replying.

Preserve existing attribute blocks unless intentionally removing the associated comment or suggestion.

Typical shapes:

• Anchored comment: {==selected text==}{>>Comment text<<}{id="c1" by="AI" at="2026-04-28T12:00:00.000Z"}
• Suggested change: {++new text++}{id="s1" by="AI" at="2026-04-28T12:10:00.000Z"} or {~~old~>new~~}{id="s2" by="AI" at="2026-04-28T12:11:00.000Z"}
• Reply: {>>Reply text<<}{id="c2" by="AI" at="2026-04-28T12:05:00.000Z" re="c1"}

For local command and syntax details: roughdraft help and roughdraft help criticmarkup.